Ancestors (19 page)

In his old age my father enchanted the Rotary Club with a speech which he titled “Memories of Lincoln Way Back When.” Being rather proud of this success, he presented me with a carbon copy of the notes he spoke from.

He began by describing the town in his boyhood in the 1880’s—the, for the most part, unpaved streets, the original courthouse and the hitching posts all around the courthouse square, the horse fountains, the volunteer fire department, the coal-oil lamps in the houses, and the outside privies. At this time the town of Lincoln was less than forty years old. Up and down the streets of the happy past my father went, locating defunct hotels and dancing academies, banks that had changed their names or failed, dry goods stores, livery stables, boarding houses, barber shops (colored and white), saloons, meat markets, jewelers, gents’ furnishings, greenhouses, ice houses, brickyards and coal mines, the collar factory and the shooting gallery. He mentioned long-dead doctors and dentists, lawyers and judges, bankers and newspaper editors, the main Negro families of the town, the major social events of the years, the sports and the sporting characters. But not one church did he name, and not one preacher.

Nothing as splendid as the World’s Columbian Exposition ever had happened in the Middle West before or has since. “For the first time cosmopolitanism visited the western world,” Louis B. Fuller wrote; “for the first time woman publicly came into her own, for the first time on a grand scale, art was made vitally manifest to the American consciousness.” And Theodore Dreiser wrote: “All at once and out of nothing, in this dingy city of six or seven hundred thousand which but a few years before had been a wilderness of wet grass and mud flats, and by this lake which but a hundred years before was but a lone silent waste, had now been reared this vast and harmonious collection of perfectly constructed and showy buildings, containing in their delightful interiors, the artistic, mechanical and scientific achievements of the world.”

If only these showy buildings had been made of white marble—but they were made of staff, a material that looked like marble and was, unfortunately, impermanent. One building, the Palace of Fine Arts, was rebuilt afterwards in marble and still stands, in Jackson Park. Everything else is gone without a trace. The huge exhibition buildings, the thousands of statues proved to be no more substantial than the jets of the fountains and the shafts of colored light. But for a whole generation of Americans who had been trying to make up their minds between Victorian Gothic and Romanesque, an image was set, and they went about reproducing on
a smaller scale in every town and city of the country the neoclassical style of those white buildings.

At some point in the summer of 1893 my Grandfather Maxwell took his family to Chicago. My father was fifteen, my Aunt Bert was seventeen, my Aunt Maybel nineteen, and my Uncle Charlie twenty-one. Putting various old photographs together, I see them moving in the immense crowd, clutching at each other’s hand or coatsleeve, lest they be separated—one eye out for purse-snatchers and pickpockets and the other for the artistic, mechanical, and scientific achievements of the world—and now and then, to their infinite amazement, coming face to face with somebody from home.

Later my grandparents went again. In my grandmother’s scrapbook there is a postcard of the Electrical Building, in color. It is impossible to tell who the card is addressed to, my grandmother’s flour-and-water paste having absorbed the writing on the other side. The message is on the front, in pencil, in my grandfather’s even hand:

My guess is that it was addressed to my Uncle Charlie, who had just graduated from college with high honors and was reading law in his father’s office.

With me, education and the formation of moral character are identical expressions.
The words are Alexander Campbell’s. The Disciples founded many schools here and there around the country, and my Grandfather Maxwell was a trustee of Eureka College, which took its ridiculous name from the small town where it was located. He sent all four of his children there. My father always spoke slightingly of it; he would have preferred to go to the University of Illinois. From my Aunt Maybel’s references to it you would have thought that Eureka College was the only institution of higher learning. Her mind expressed itself most naturally in mythological terms, and there was usually just one of everything. While she was a student at Eureka College she was the victim of an injustice that still rankled, and that she would tell about every time the subject of Eureka College came up. If my father and my Aunt Bert were present, they would join in, because the story was common property. When my Uncle Charlie was a freshman, one of his professors mispronounced a word in class and my Uncle Charlie set him straight on it. Professor Hieronymous didn’t forgive him for this, nor did he forgive my Aunt Maybel, when she came along two years later; nor my Aunt Bert, two years after that; nor my father. He flunked all four of them because my Uncle Charlie corrected him on the pronunciation of a word. Judging by the photographs of my father taken in college, he did not let this blight his life.

There are three of them in my grandmother’s scrapbook: My father with a black derby on the back of his head and a huge football-game chrysanthemum in his buttonhole. My father and three friends, in four-button suits, with their hats tipped back and their hands on each other’s shoulders and their teeth clamped on half-smoked cigars, which are tilted at a not quite convincing angle. My father with a girl. She is wearing a shirtwaist and a boater, and is posed selfconsciously, with one elbow on a property garden gate that has
climbing
daisies on it. There is, naturally, no garden. My father is on the other side of the gate and holds a furled umbrella rakishly over his right shoulder. I never saw him hold an umbrella in that way. It must have been the photographer’s idea. My father’s other hand is in the pocket of his white flannel trousers. His leather belt is three inches wide, and he is wearing a white bow tie. The girl is gazing at my father with a look of unfocused mistrust. And he, with his easy, off-balance stance, his strong arms and wrists, his good shoulders and thick hair, his mysterious half-smile, is a creature of physical perfection.

He was not always like that. The earliest picture of him I know was taken when he was somewhere between seven and nine years old. I recognize the shape of the head and the large ears and the mouth, and am baffled by the clear blue eyes, which are full of light but have no expression whatever in them. Was it again the photographer? Or was it those frightful attacks of asthma in which he more than once thought he was going to suffocate?

After a little experimental fingering he could play any instrument he got his hands on. I don’t know how old he was when he began to take violin lessons, but at the age of twelve or thirteen he performed in Gillett’s Opera House, which appears to have been a large hall over a clothing store on the courthouse square. Again I see them all—on the front row, and clutching their programs this time, and measuring their applause so that it will not seem exaggerated and foolish, even though they have a right to feel proud. He also played in the church orchestra. His violin teacher, who was a member of the Christian church, suffered from the unchristian emotion of jealousy—or so it was said in the family—and when my father composed a schottische for orchestra, he failed to tell him that the score for certain instruments had to be half a tone higher or lower for harmony. There was no rehearsal. The violins and clarinets were allowed to play
what my father innocently put down on ruled music paper. His shame was so great that he never composed another piece of music. I don’t for one minute think that the world was thereby done out of a second Mozart, but still I wish it hadn’t happened.

He helped pay his way through college by organizing a mandolin club and giving lessons to the members. A woman on the music faculty at Eureka College thought that he was talented and said that she would teach him to play the piano if he would give up ragtime in favor of Bach and Czerny. My father extricated himself from this kind offer and went right on reading the treble and faking the chords in the bass. His plans were made: When he finished college he was going to study medicine at the University of Illinois, and perhaps he would have if things had gone differently at home. That maddening electric bell didn’t do the trick. Before the year was out, my Aunt Bert had made a disastrous marriage and my Uncle Charlie was dead.

My Aunt Bert announced that she was going to marry him after she had known him exactly two weeks. My grandfather got on the train and went to Waukesha, Wisconsin, the place where Louis Fuller was born and brought up, and asked the cashier of the bank about him, and was told that he came of a good family. Why the cashier did not feel free to tell my grandfather that he was the black sheep of that family I don’t know, any more than I know why my grandfather felt he could not address his questions to Louis Fuller’s family.

Although it is a scene I find hard to imagine, I don’t think my father was speaking metaphorically when he said, “Father begged Bert on his knees not to marry Fuller. She wouldn’t listen to him.” My grandfather was up against the same streak of mulishness in his daughter that he had to
deal with in his wife. Or she may have been so in love that she didn’t care what anybody said. My grandmother’s scrapbook contains an engraved announcement of my Aunt Maybel’s marriage to David Paul Coffman, but not of my Aunt Bert’s marriage to Louis E. Fuller. They didn’t run off, but were married in the parlor of the house on Kickapoo Street, by the minister of the Christian church, on April 2, 1898. On the back of the wedding license the groom’s occupation is given as “journalist.”

When my father and mother went out for the evening they took me with them and put me on a sofa in the next room, or sometimes the same room, and I woke up in the morning in my own bed without knowing how I got there. Falling asleep I heard a good many things that were not intended for my ears or that it was assumed I would not understand. In time I discovered that if I kept my eyes closed and didn’t move and was careful to breathe regularly, the conversation often became more interesting. Ordinarily it was mostly about crops and recipes; now and then it widened to include disappointment and heartache. I soon had a very good idea not only of what husbands were inconsiderate of their wives’ feelings but also of what they said or did that was so intolerable and that would have provided adequate grounds for divorce if only the wife could bring herself to take action. My Aunt Bert’s difficulties with her second husband were sometimes referred to, but her first marriage and divorce were never mentioned—I now think because the only persons who knew the facts did not choose to discuss them. I decided that whatever the trouble was, it was so far in the past as to be of no interest to anybody any longer. This was not true.

My aunt appeared in court, in Lincoln, on May 19, 1902, with my grandfather acting as her attorney, and was granted a divorce and the custody of her child. The details remained safely buried in the County Clerk’s office for more than half
a century. They are (the deletions being in every case simple legal longwindedness) as follows:

“Oratrix … represents that the said Louis E. Fuller … on or about the 9th day of January
A.D.
1900 … absented himself … without any reasonable cause, for the space of two years and upwards, and has persisted in such desertion.

“… that the said Louis E. Fuller … had been guilty of extreme and repeated cruelty toward your Oratrix, that he is a man of great austerity of temper, and frequently, during the time your Oratrix lived … with him, he indulged in violent sallies of passion and used toward your Oratrix very obscene and abusive language without any provocation whatever …”

(“Bertha’s tongue,” my father used to say, and shake his head. But no doubt she thought there had been no provocation.)

“… when your Oratrix was confined in childbirth at Springfield, Ill., the said Louis E. Fuller cruelly and heartlessly absented himself from their Boarding House … and your Oratrix had to solicit the aid of strangers for care and assistance of herself and newborn child until help could reach her from her parents …